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Irna Phillips (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Turn the clock back 80 years, and you can find the first stirrings of what Facebook is doing today. Credit should go to Irna Phillips, a Chicago teacher by training, who in the early 1930s helped create one of radio's first serial dramas, Painted Dreams. She followed that up with 18 radio or television serials over the next 40 years, chronicling the long-running intrigues of various clusters of people who became imagined real-life confidantes to millions of viewers and listeners.

Phillips's creations focused in the timeless inner world of friendships and rivalries; kisses and quarrels. Her characters hardly blinked at the epoch-changing events of each decade: war, civil-rights struggles, the feminist awakening and the like. Her longest-running classics, such as "Guiding Light" and "As the World Turns," won fans because they provided intense, timeless escapes from the headlines.

That format turned out to be a godsend for advertisers. Mindful of her shows' commercial value, Phillips built long-term alliances with key advertisers such as America's leading soap company: Procter & Gamble. If necessary, everything could be built around an advertiser's tastes. Thisprofile draws attention to Masquerade, "a short-lived show involving glamorous women that was designed to sell cosmetics."

Today, Facebook can weave ads into the story -- and the story into the ads -- with even greater skill. If a few of my friends choose to "like" Groupon or Wal-Mart on Facebook, I start to see more Groupon and Wal-Mart ads. Well-played, Mr. Zuckerberg! A year ago, conventional wisdom was that Facebook might lose users' loyalty if it pushed ads too heavily. So far, that hasn't been a problem at all.

What's missing? I'm not seeing the ideas, news and passionate arguments that define other high-voltage sites. Today's Facebook isn't Twitter or Reddit. It's not Huffington Post, Wikileaks or Drudge Report. A few years ago, Facebook wanted to play in that world, too. Its executives were tremendously excited about the ways that social activists in Colombia or Egypt relied on Facebook to rally public interest in their causes.

Perhaps activists still can get some mileage out of their Facebook accounts. But the site no longer strikes me as being optimized for change-the-world campaigns. It takes money now to get sponsored posts in front of big audiences. The organizations most capable of spending that way tend to be very much in the mold of Irna Phillips's long-ago corporate sponsors.

Back in February 2012, when Mark Zuckerberg was about to take Facebook public, he wrote an open letter to investors, in which he declared: "Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected."

That was bold language back then. It might have made investors nervous. But from everything that Facebook is doing today, investors needn't worry much about that "social mission" stuff any more.